The
governor's office is reached by a dirt road that winds south from the
capital through a hillside jungle stretching along the east side of Lake
Tanganyika. Major Bathalzar Ntamahungiro, the governor, won't travel the

Nelson
Mandela excoriated the leaders of both groups for failing to redress
the imbalance of power between Hutus and Tutsis. Credit: Anna Zieminski/AFP

road at night and ambushes are common in daytime, so he is happy when
his visitors arrive at his tree-shrouded headquarters after a 90-minute
journey from the capital.

Six months ago, he says, the rebels wreaked havoc on the main road and
often killed peasant farmers. Now his soldiers patrol the road, and the
peasants in this province are safer, he says, having been removed from
their homes and herded into 55 "regroupment" camps. The peasants, guarded
by government troops, can leave their temporary mud homes during the day
but must return in the evening. Conditions are abysmal. Hundreds of people
are crammed onto a small patch of bare hillside. They lack running water,
electricity, schools or health clinics. Families live in small, mud-walled
huts covered by plastic tarps.

In the camp, surrounded by government soldiers and cut off from their
crops and homes, it is harder for them to help the rebels, the governor
says. "We are putting all the means we have into destroying the enemy,"
he adds. "But when you're fighting a guerrilla war, you don't win overnight.
You can't predict when the fighting will end."

Ntamahungiro is talking about Burundi's seven-year civil war, but it
well describes all of Africa's wars. The continent, after a period of
relative optimism, this year seemed poised to overcome - or at least tame
- the forces of ethnicity, greed and conflict that characterized the '90s.
In an apparent watershed, the U.N. Security Council even devoted the month
of February to easing African tensions, with U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke
making a well-publicized visit to Central Africa, where he extolled the
possibilities for reconciliation, peace-building and development.